China driving visitor arrival growth

Recently released key metrics by Tourism Research Australia for international visitor trends for the year ending June 2018 (save for Average International Visitor Expenditure) reflected positive growth trends, with significant double digit growth in visitor arrivals from China – up 13.07 per cent to 1,312,226 visitors and India – up 20.5 per cent to 314,045, albeit off a smaller base.

The importance of the China inbound market to Australia was amplified when considering the number of nights Chinese visitors spent in Australia – at almost 57,000,000, was greater than the next top three countries combined, in United Kingdom (22,241,546); India (18,068,194) and the United States of America (13,463,956). Although representing the second most number of arrivals at 1,244,473, length of stay by New Zealand visitors fell by 10.9 per cent to 12,827,187 nights (5th most).

Just over a quarter of all international visitor nights in Australia (25.5 per cent) where spent in Victoria (67,380,455), to place our state a clear, yet distant, second behind New South Wales (94,419,977 nights and 35 per cent of all visitors). Melbourne also ranked a clear (again distant) second, behind Sydney (8,736,980) for nights spent by international visitors in hotels, motels and resorts at 5,834,750 nights, however this represented a decline of 8.59 per cent on the previous year (6,383,122 to Y.E. June 2017). When appreciating that nights spent in capital cities by international guests across all accommodation categories actually grew by 2.93 per cent to 220,003,912 nights, it is apparent (and confirmed by the graph in Table 5.1 International Visitor Nights by Accommodation Category) that there has been a continued growth in use by these visitors of “rented plus other private accommodation,” that includes Airbnb-type rentals.

Please click on the link below to find TAA’s analysis of these key metrics: